Elementary teachers’ bridge course issue: state govt responsible for the mess: principal Budhram

Chandigarh, March 18

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has taken a serious view of the uncertainty looming over the fate of thousands of untrained elementary teachers who might face marching orders owing to their failure to undergoing 6-month mandatory Bridge Course. He has squarely held the responsible both the Punjab and union government for the Himalayan botch-up.

Terming the proposal to sacking of untrained primary government school teachers as dictatorial, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Punjab unit chief of the core committee, principal Budhram  said here on Monday that the Captain Amarinder Singh Government and the preceding SAD-BJP  government were responsible for not asking the teachers to undergo the mandatory training.

Budhran accused the state government of not attaching importance to the issue surrounding the elementary education, which had already ebbed to its nadir in the state even as the NDA government led by PM Narendra Modi had set up a cut-off date for the said teachers’ training in 2017.

He said that the union ministry for human resource development dictat making it mandatory for all elementary school teachers across the state till April this year, i.e. 2019, which had come as a crude joke for them.

He further added that it was distressing to note that the fate of some 13, 207 teachers out of a total of 15,906 working in various government primary schools, primarily in Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patiala, Hoshiarpur districts, et al, had been hanging in the balance due to the government’s lethargy.

What has come as the shot of a sledge hammer to them was the point blank refusal by the union government to the state government’s plea seeking exemption from the statutory course reportedly under pressure from teachers’ bodies, which had come as adding salt to their festering wounds.

Blaming the education department responsible for the dilemma, Budhram said that shifting the onus on to the teachers was the height of injustice meted out to the teachers, with the secretary elementary education, saying the fault lay with the teachers for not acceding to the department’s directives to register themselves for the course. He said this was nothing but just shying away from their responsibilities to resolve the issue, once and for all.

The AAP leaders pointed fingers on the two union ministers in the NDA government, Vijay Sampla and Harsimrat Kaur Badal for their non-serious stance towards the issue haunting the teachers for a pretty long time now and take up it to the conclusive end, he said.

Budhram urged upon the Captain Amarinder Singh Government to broach the issue with the union government to review decision and mull a roll back on the proposed decision thus salvaging the aggrieved teachers from the crisis they were currently trapped in. He also appealed to Sampla and Badal to come to the rescue of the teachers facing a predicament due the government’s apathy, thereby saving teeming millions of poor students from being debarred from the right to esucation.